War Of The Worlds

Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins
Real stars: ILM's fantastic Tripods

Not since Orson Welles scared the shit out of suburban America with his broadcast version of H.G. Wells' 107-year novel has there been a truly scary sci-fi invasion story. It's the idea of aliens I suppose. They are fantastical by nature, so our treatment of them tends to be comic, and whatever destruction visited upon us is merely a setup of how clever, how enduring we all really are as a species. You can bring your flying saucers and your zap guns. But we will open up a can of whup-ass for ya.

So Spielberg and screenwriter David Keopp decide to give us something new by giving us something old: returning to Wells’ original material and staying true to his theme: that there is no defense against an marauding alien force. It is a holocaust, an act of genocide, and viewed through the lens of our September 12 eyes, it is a terrorist attack on a planetary scale.

In this new version, no time is wasted. Cruise's Ray Ferrier is quickly established (crane operator, divorced, maybe a bit of an asshole) and the storm begins. The Tripods arrive, ripping the city to shreds by cutting a death ray swath through the city. And so begins what feels like an unbroken half-hour run for dear life as the Ferriers try to escape not just the Tripods but frenzied, desperate citizens reduced to mobs.

The movie is told through Ray's eyes, with no cutaways. We discover the devastation and learn about the invaders only as he discovers them – through TV reports, peeks through windows and terrified backward glances. But this first-person claustrophobia which kept the tension so high in the movie's first act becomes the movie's undoing.

We only see Ray's city, and the extent of this global ethnic cleansing - so expertly implied through the news coverage - is never fully explored. The carnage we see follows strictly the Ferriers' flight through their town. The inevitable military response is not shown, a missed opportunity to play out the spectacle of our impotent weapons against the Tripod's impressive force. What we were promised, a planet under attack, soon becomes a more localised event.

There are of course shiny bits. The madness that follows the initial shock is unnerving. In one scene a man attempts to widen a hole in the windshield to gain entry into the Ferriers’ car oblivious to the glass cutting into his hands. An attack on a ferry is the Titanic revisited. And there's the Tripods. Holy fuck, the Tripods. Possibly ILM’s best work, so different from the showy whiz-bang of Star Wars, ILM’s machines are so believably menacing because they are matter-of-fact. All steel and brute force and horrible, horrible sounds.

Human performances however, fall short. Dakota Fanning can do the screaming, crying child with her eyes closed. Ray’s son Robbie has no purpose except perhaps to irritate his father (not too different from Kim Bauer in 24). And what is perhaps Tom’s most different role – blue collar, not a prodigy in his field, a bit of a fuck-up – is one he cannot play.

The movie is very faithful to the book. During that first assault, when the characters are caught off guard, so are we. This is not a sci-fi film. It's a war movie. It is Saving Private Ryan and people are being oh Christ people are being slaughtered. But old habits are hard to break and instead of keeping it real and harsh, Steven derails his juggernaut with sentimentality. WOTW ends (literally) with rays of sunshine and hope and looks and oh shiat, closure.

The first 80% of the movie is incredible. That first half hour is very real, so fucking real in fact you don’t hear the word ‘Martian’ in the entire script. But when the Tripods finally fall, it's anti-climactic, and it feels like they had to end it quickly so they did. We were being chased, we were running for our lives only to discover quite suddenly, we are no longer being pursued. This can’t be all, we think. But it is.